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Summer 2010

Features

Dear Reader :: A printed magazine story sits alone on a page with relatively little competition for the reader's attention. An online story sits only a few keystrokes from a torrent of other stories, tweets, videos, free classifieds and emails. And why exactly does this matter? by Eric Sorensen

Time Out in the World :: Today's graduates aren't just dropping into the rat race. They're going to Africa, South America, Seattle and Spokane. They're out to see the world and make a difference. by Hannelore Sudermann

The Academic Library in the Age of Google :: Information naivete suggests a broader blind faith in the offerings of Google–mirroring a general faith in technology that in some ways defines our culture and propels our economy. by Tim Steury

Big Ideas :: We delve into WSU's rich intellectual history, listing some of the great ideas and discoveries that have come out of our institution. by staff writers

Shall I Eat a Peach?

At the risk of sounding either shopworn (which I hope I’m not) or
like a Luddite (my identification with said philosophy depending on the
day of the week), the thing I’m most looking forward to in “retirement,”
besides being able to focus full-time on farming and my craft, is being
able to go as long as I want without having to stare at this computer
screen.

Don’t get me wrong. This computer is a marvelous thing. Besides
serving as a super-charged typewriter, it gathers all sorts of
information, almost effortlessly, in far less time than that outmoded
method of reading books and poring through abstracts or indexes in a
library.

“Knowledge is of two kinds,” noted Samuel Johnson in 1775. “We know a
subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
Johnson would surely raise an eyebrow over how his observation has been
amplified. Indeed, that second type of knowledge is now so negotiable as
to render the first almost unnecessary.

Just kidding. I think so, anyway.

But what is it about this medium, which offers so much in the way of
information and communication, that irks and oppresses in various ways.
Is it that it delivers its information so unfiltered, with such little
discretion that it becomes in the end more diversion and distraction
than useful tool? Is it that the information it delivers is so
dominantly trivial, juvenile, and silly? Is it, as some worry, that it
is destroying my concentration, my ability to read a book?

And I have, indeed, noticed a strange disruption of my attention
span, an exaggerated compulsion toward diversion and tangent, a tendency
to glean my information in bits and chunks. And it’s hard to argue with
the fact that I can learn all I need to know about Eisenhower’s role in
D-Day quickly, in easily digestible summary, from this computer. Why
would I need to read Michael Korda’s Ike to attain that
isolated information?

Well, besides what I think are obvious reasons, such a question
strikes me as parallel to the challenge of those clean-fingernailed
folks who ridicule the habit of gardening because it can’t possibly be
economical. (And even though it was also Dr. Johnson who said, “No man
but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” the pleasure here is
indeed in the writing.)

The medium, as Marshall McLuhan argued long before the Internet
entered the public imagination, is never neutral. It is, in fact, the
message. Of course, Socrates understood the same thing centuries earlier
when he worried that writing would damage one’s native memory.

One wonders what form the Big Ideas explored in this issue might have
taken had their originators spent their days in front of a computer
screen? I doubt that entomologist A.L. Melander would have spent much
time at all watching videos on YouTube had it been available in 1915.
But then again, the seduction of the Internet’s databases might well
have drawn his attention away from the careful observation that led him
to first realize that certain populations of insects were not dying from
pesticides as they should have been.

Or what if Enoch Bryan had spent his days deleting his email and
writing his education blog rather than tending to his growing young
college? The role of the liberal arts in an agricultural and scientific
education may have lost its import in the face of the Internet’s
presumed universal knowledge.

But then again, with such readily available information to aid their
thinking, their ideas might well have been even Bigger.